


So If You're Lonely

by HeartOfTheMirror



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Brainwashing, Character Study, Drabble, Enemies to Lovers, Friends to Enemies, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, M/M, Minor Character Death, Past Brainwashing, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-09
Updated: 2014-04-09
Packaged: 2018-01-18 19:16:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1439743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HeartOfTheMirror/pseuds/HeartOfTheMirror
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve missed the old dream.</p>
            </blockquote>





	So If You're Lonely

**Author's Note:**

> Heavily inspired by the Franz Ferdinand song "Take Me Out" which is my ultimate Steve/Bucky song. I highly recommend you listen while reading, honestly it's perfect and fantastic.
> 
> Wouldn't have written this without the charming and persuasive Moirai's encouragement.

Steve woke up to a new, older, world with a weight on his chest. It wasn’t that he wanted to go back to sleep, but maybe he could admit he missed the dream. That roseate reflection of the past, cast in the light of aged eyes. The one with a past he understood. The one that was constantly reaching for a vision of the future, a better one, where everyone was given a fair shake and played by the rules, where one man never outweighed the good of all, yet each man and woman was free. It had seemed so plausible back then when he was brighter eyed and bushier taled. 

Yes, he wanted the dream back, the gauzy days of good guys and bad guys, of them versus us and easily defined morality. He still wanted that, but some days he woke up to songs on the radio he didn’t understand, and Twitter tracking where he bought his coffee, and a million car horns screaming that people had come closer together than ever, that the world was smaller now, not bigger but more full and everyone seemed to hate it. Buildings scarred the sky, billionaires like Icarus thinking they were above the rest, looking out over the city with scorn and superiority. What had ever happened to good neighbors? To the little guys? To the way it was before?

He wasn’t a fool. He’d known even then, and he remembered now, that nothing was perfect about his time. The time he’d been born into. But things felt so much simpler back then- the rhetoric was easier to believe, the people easier to trust, the whole world had felt like a solid place then, fewer people, slower lives, enough room for everyone, always enough time. There was a problem in Germany, and like a disease it sprang up in Italy and Japan, but there was no way it could ever infect the good ol’ US of A. Because the rest of the world was so far away. Because the good guys always fought fairly and they fought for the right reasons and the good guys fought the bad guys and the good guys always won.

He wasn’t entirely sure about that anymore. 

…

Bucky fell asleep certain that the world would have one less beating heart in it, that the future had been changed. He wanted to live on, for Steve, to take him to the end of the line, to carry him through the war. Everyone was so caught up in watching Captain America at work that they forgot to watch his back. It worried Bucky when he’d been taken, because that was his job, always had been, and who would do it now? If there was one thing Bucky knew it was Steve and super soldiers weren’t invincible.

He called out to his friend when he fell, reaching across a distance that could never be breached. But through the pain and the unfairness of it all there was one crystal clear thought, more burning and radiant than the sun-

Steve would change the world the way he’d always wanted to, he’d be the hero he’d always dreamt of being. Captain America would bring them all into the future (all of them except the ones who fell on the road to victory, all of them but Bucky). It didn’t matter that he’d fallen, been left behind, died in the snow so far from Brooklyn. For once, everything would be okay. Steeve would never stop until he made sure of that. He’d fix it for everyone with that incorruptible light of his.

…

Steve woke up to a new, older, world after the battle of New York. He thought about Pearl Harbor and looked up at the vast cheerful blue of the sky, wondering who was on the other side of that sea. 

He should have had his eyes closer to home.

Steve had heard the old saying back in the days when he was just a runt trying desperately to stand up for himself on the schoolyard ( _the thing about.. _). It hadn’t made sense then.__

He didn’t want to rely on Bucky, to hide behind him and be an imposition. What Steve had always wanted, then and now, was to stand on his own two feet and take responsibility for himself. It was Bucky more than anyone that taught him that it was okay sometimes to take help when you needed it. To take a hand when it was offered. 

He’d loved his parents but it was Bucky’s friendship that he felt most grateful for. His mother had never been able to see him as anything other than her baby. Her little man, her fragile darling. He hated breaking her heart each time he came home with a bloody nose, or tried to tell her about how he wanted more. He loved her and she loved him.

With Bucky it was different. Bucky saw him with perfect clarity. He didn’t condescend or cry for Steve when he fell down. He was the only one who had treated Steve like an equal, worthy. But that was before the doctor chose him and afterwards… Afterwards was a different book, starting on a strange new chapter where everyone saw something in Steve that baffled him and made him proud at the same time. He thought of Bucky, thought of his friend’s steadfastness, his faith and confidence in Steve. Before all others had seen, Bucky had.

He’d heard the old saying ( _The thing about betrayal..._ ) before but he hadn’t thought much of it then. He only had one friend and he was willing to stake his life that Bucky would be with him through thick and thin, no matter what. _The thing about betrayal is that it never comes from an enemy._

…

Bucky fell asleep certain that the world would have one less beating heart in it, that the future had been changed. He had killed one of the soviet bastards with the metal arm they welded on him. The phantom pains never left the limb, never left the center of his chest, though it was undamaged. He knew it was undamaged.  
It was the only part of him that wasn’t broken, so why did it hurt so much?

He saw a shot and he took it, a window the scope of a breath but they’d done their jobs well and his reflexes were more well tuned than ever before. Metal fingers tightened with brutal precision, choking, crushing, turning the man’s windpipe, his carotid artery and jugular vein, to so much pulp under the red impulse of Bucky’s inescapable rage, his fury at his own helplessness and degradation. He was not their guinea pig. He didn’t belong to them.  
He was a man, not a machine. He had free will, a mind of his own, and he was no one’s toy to play with.

...

Steve woke up to a new, older world, in which he was a wanted man and the only two people he could trust with his life were a near stranger and the woman who had tricked Loki, God of Lies. Times were strange. Dead men walked the earth with familiar faces.

Was it a betrayal if he didn’t know he was doing it? Was it a betrayal if Steve broke his many vows, leaving his oldest friend, letting him die so that millions of others may live? The price of freedom was high. The cost on one man was enormous. But there was only one way to win a war as Steve saw it- put your head down and knuckle through it. Endure the hard things so that others might not have to. In the end there was really no choice. It was simple morality. 

Sometimes Steve wondered if he was really awake or just trapped in that ice dreaming. How was it that the world worked like this? He wanted to know what the man upstairs watching thought of all this strangeness, these dark turns that fate took, the macabre laughing face of destiny that hung Janus-like on the back of one beautiful, golden and glorious, radiating victory. He wanted to know why God would design such a world, that lured you in with the honest desire to do good for your fellow man then sprang shut, upping the price of victory only after it was too late to back out of the fight.

But he didn’t have the heart to search for an answer besides the one he’d always been told: Everything is a test, fight your way through and do the best you can because it’s all that you can do. Put out the fire closest to your feet Rogers.

He would do what he had to do.

…

The Winter Soldier fell asleep certain that the world would have one less beating heart in it, that the future had been changed. He knew he had done the right thing.

Defectors, treasonous dogs, deserved to die. Backstabbers, betrayers, scum. They had explained it all to him. His masters, with their stern, scientific faces.  
He had a mission and he was a tool of the state, designed so that other men may live in peace and safety or die under the banner of their disobedience.  
It was hard for him to remember it all. Words didn’t stick like he thought they should. They slipped through his fingers like wet sand- some falling in massive clumps and others sticking stubbornly between the webbing of his fingers and under his nails where they were not wanted. 

What made sense was motion. Fight, block, hit, kick, pull trigger, disengage, breakdown, clean, repeat. Over and over again they drilled him until he fell to his knees unable to continue. 

Then he was beaten. Or whipped. But it was good. Pain was just weakness leaving the body and he had to learn to be strong. For the motherland. For mankind.  
He pulled the trigger and they froze him into sleep. Until next time Winter Soldier.

…

Steve woke up in a new, older world and he saw the sky and he knew that he’d been saved. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so whole, so free from the weight on his chest. He had hope again. An amazingly adaptive blossom pushing it’s way through the soil of loss and regret.

The thing about burnt earth policies was that they helped new things grow in their wake that didn't have room to blossom before.

…

The Winter Soldier fell asleep certain that the world would have one less beating heart in it, that the future had been changed. 

He couldn’t remember. Everytime he thought he had something they took it away. Years lurched forward. Motion sickness made of time playing jump rope. Every time he opened his eyes there was a new year to greet him. So much to learn but not really. Not for him. He was trained on what he needed to know, only. Guns, knives, weapons, martial arts, piloting aircraft and motor vehicles. 

They programed him and he liked it. The pain made his mind pure. He didn’t have to worry, he just had to accept direction. They programmed him and he hated it. It hurt and it ripped it all away from him, all the things he’d fought so hard for. Thing’s he’d fought to learn. Things he accidentally remembered in blurry sketches and vague sensations, triggered by the most unexpected things. 

He functioned perfectly until he found that he still desired. He wanted. His masters hated it. They called him dog. Useless. What good was an assassin who couldn’t forgo sleep and food and warmth for days? What good was an assassin who still found use for comfort, who paused in that critical second before pulling the trigger on a diplomat’s blue eyed scrawny son?

He wanted to do better. Maybe if he could do better they would stop locking him away. Maybe he’d wake up and still know when he was.

But then there was doubt.

But then there was a familiar face where there shouldn’t have been.

They started erasing him daily. Reprogramming him as often as necessary.

The Winter Soldier was lost. Only objectives made sense. Only missions.

Captain America, Steve Rogers, didn’t make any sense at all. Aberration. Kind. Who was he? Who had he been before his masters had reprogrammed him for the first time? The last time? All the lost Winter Soldiers in between. Decades had passed since he even dared to think the question.

“Who am I? Who was I?”

…

Steve woke up with a weight on his chest and he knew before he opened his eyes that it was Bucky. It was too dark to see the brown of his friend’s eyes. He could only barely make out the strangled strands of hair escaping the sloppy tie at the nape of Bucky’s neck, but it was impossible to miss the warm length of him, pressed from Steve’s collar bones to his knees. Or the fleshy hand clamped unforgivingly over his mouth.

“Things are different now,” the harsh voice of the man above him slipped through the scant darkness between them. “I remember pieces. Impressions. You remember it all. We were friends. It’s different now.” Bucky sounded like he was trying to convince himself of this more than Steve, like the fact of it made him unspeakably angry, enraged, and worse, confused. 

Steve slipped his hands to Bucky’s sides, trying to think of some way to soothe him, this half-stranger in his friend’s face. He knew why he hadn’t woken until now- it wasn’t just that the Winter Soldier was a master of his craft- it was that some stupid, persistent part of Steve insisted that he could still trust the man in this flesh. Bucky would never hurt him and even if he did, even if the Winter Soldier broke through and finished his last mission, then so what? It was better than breaking his promise to Bucky. Better by far than fighting the man he called brother.

Bucky removed his hand, the gesture somehow hesitant. 

“Buck-” He thrust his lips against Steve’s, taking. Holding Steve down like this was a fight too. Stunned beyond all reason, Steve let him. Bucky bit his lip ungently. Steve made a little sound in the back of his throat, still beneath his friend, not sure what he should do. Bucky broke away, breathing raggedly as if he’d been wounded where Steve’s hands carefully cradled his ribs. 

“I have dreams about you,” the broken soldier confessed in a broken voice. “You touch me. No one touches me. You tell me I’m a good boy. You take me home. Brooklyn a long time ago. We’re naked and you love me.”

“Bucky,” Steves voice breaks, his heart breaks. He wonders how it ever felt so easy to bring things together, to mend fences and bring light. Not here. He couldn’t even see the lips that moved so relentlessly against his own.

“I know,” Bucky bit out harshly. “I know that’s not what happens here. We never did that. Things were different. Are different. I just want this one thing. You’ll let me have it because you’re good.” Bucky didn’t sound so sure about that and Steve didn’t care, it didn’t matter if it was a carefully calibrated affectation or not because the truth was that it was always a very short distance between Bucky’s bullet and Steve’s heart. There had never been anything but a crosshair between them, not since they felt the touch of ice, lost to the world they’d known. 

There was a time when the only thing that had kept him going was the firm desire to make sure that his best man, his best friend, had not died in vain.  
Well now he hadn’t. He hadn’t died at all and he still needed Steve. 

“You can have it,” Steve said. “You can have anything you need Bucky.” The Winter Soldier whined like a kicked dog, unable to handle anything like those soft words against his bare skin. 

He bit at Steeve, clawed at his clothing. pressed him down, held him in the cage of his limbs, demanding, unrelenting, growing increasingly frustrated as his attempts to take failed to give him what he needed. But Steve had a knack for reading him, even after all this time. He dragged his fingertips lightly over Bucky’s back, pressed easy kisses along his jaw, over his brow, down the set and reset line of his nose. Each time, each kiss, Bucky shuddered with it, flinched and pressed himself closer, as if affection was a 170 proof liquor he was trying for the first time.

“Burn me. Hurt me,” Bucky said, accused, asked, swimming in the jangled bath of sensations that was his own mind. 

“Never.” Steve promised, kissing Bucky’s full lips softly, cradling him in his arms, between his legs, keeping him safe. “I’ve got you Buck. I’m with you. I’m with you to the end of the line.”

…

Bucky fell asleep certain only of the beating heart beneath his cheek, that the future had been changed. For him if not for anyone else, if not for the world.

…

In the morning Steve sent a text. Natasha deserved to know he’d found someone with similar life experiences.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you liked it! Please remember that kudos, comments and reviews are always welcome and much loved. Better than chocolate cake for writers ;)


End file.
